Last weekend I had the privilege of attending the 2011 Western Engineering Competition (WEC) at the University of Sasketoon. The activities were a blast and the Senior Design competition was great. After presenting our design, we felt that we did really well. The other teams also did great jobs and I’m sure it was very tough for the judges to make their final decisions. Sadly, we did not win, but we had a great time competing and getting to know fellow students from across the country. We took some video of our robot/tractor and I have embedded them below.

In this challenge, we had to remote control our robot tractor and drive it across the “pasture” (represented here by a steep, ~40˚ slope covered in a plastic tarp and a layer of very soft dirt). We had to avoid hurting any livestock or the environment (ie. the trees). While it looks like we did quite poorly, everyone got about the same distance on this one.

In this challenge, we had to separate the “wheat” (marbles) from the “chaff” (rice) using our robot. The robots built by most of the other teams used the vex panels themselves (they have lots of holes) to filter out the marbles, but this was slow and required agitation. Our robot used some rails on end that left gaps barely wide enough to catch the marbles and let the rice immediately fall to the ground.

In this challenge, we had to remotely control our robot to move a pile of “manure” (loose dirt) from it’s initial location across a line. Our performance in this challenge was not great as it was hard to maneuver our robot in the tight space, plus our scraping mechanism did not reach as low as we would have liked.

In this challenge we had to autonomously get our robot to navigate a figure 8 around a pair of “barrels” (pop cans) and then complete a lap of an oval track. The oval was no problem, and in our testing we could do it very quickly, but the preceding figure 8 in the soft dirt made it impossible to line up for the lap. None of the competitors were able to complete this challenge. Since it was worth 50% of our demonstration mark, that put a lot of weight on our presentation.

During building, we found that our gripper arm had a lot of torque, so after competition we tried to cut a marshmallow in half. Sadly, the gears kept slipping since we had stressed out all of our mounts during competition, but we had fun anyway.

After playing with our robot for a bit, we decided to attach a phone to the arm. This clip was just to get a “first person” clip, but we later set up an IP webcam server from a phone to remotely control it. It was a bit laggy, but tons of fun.